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WHAT A RELIEF!: By the time you read this, the Mariners may have clinched the AL West championship and secured a role in the baseball playoffs. They were damn close to the clinch when this was written, but with the state of the Ms’ bullpen all year long nothing was sure. For just such jittery situations, Queen Anne-based Beadle Enterprises now offers Ninth Inning Worry Beads. These translucent plastic beads on a metal string come in Mariner blue and tourquoise, with a tiny wooden baseball and bat attached. The company claims they’re just the thing to “soothe nasty symptoms associated with penant fever. Twirl them. Rub them. Jiggle them. Hold them in your hands and pray. They’re almost guaranteed to work.” (Sales info: 217-9002.)
A SCHMICH IN TIME: Earlier this summer, a humorous text document was disseminated on the Internet far and wide, labeled as a commencement address to MIT graduates by author Kurt Vonnegut. Then, Net news sites (and mainstream news media) reported it was a hoax: Vonnegut never spoke at MIT, and the witty words-O-advice to today’s youth were from a Chicago Tribune column by Mary Schmich. Earlier this month, the Seattle Scroll ran a story about Internet rumormongering, claiming (via an email message from one Jem Casey, purportedly reprinting a Chronicle of Higher Education article) the hoax story was itself a hoax–that Vonnegut really did give the speech at MIT, and nobody named Mary Schmich had ever worked for the Tribune. From there, Scroll writer Jesse Walker uses the case to chastize the media for their collective “Internet hysteria.”
Walker’s arguments are well-taken and I agree with most of them. Too bad the anti-hoax message he opens his piece with is, you guessed it, a hoax. All Walker had to do was look up the Tribune‘s Schmich page (www.chicago.tribune.com/columns/schmich/archives/97/803.htm) to learn she’s real, she really wrote the words-O-advice (which included a plea to be sure and use sunscreen), and Vonnegut was nowhere near MIT this past June.
(After this was originally posted, Walker wrote in to say he knew the anti-hoax statement was a hoax, and that careful readers of his piece could have discerned that he knew.)
NOT THE SAME OLD SONG:Some weeks back, Misc. asked your input on formerly-popular musical genres that haven’t yet been turned into hip revivals. Some of you continued to write in past the initial deadline. Here’s some more of your nominations, with some more of my comments:
WELCOME ALL to your pre-autumnal-equinox edition of Misc., the pop-cult column that can’t decide whether the new-look Seattle Weekly represents the passing of the moderation-to-excess aesthetic that’s dominated local media for a quarter-century, or instead just signifies a corporation trying too hard to appear hip. Speaking of commercial images in flux…
EVERYTHING RETRO IS NEO AGAIN: A half-decade ago, back when the outside world associated Seattle hipster-wear with looks actually designed in NYC by the likes of Marc Jacobs, the Zebraclub store on 1st Ave. was a bright, white showcase for the loudly-logoed products of Seattle’s real youthwear industry, with such once-hyped labels as Generra and International News. Today, the big Z sports a “homier” image, with faux-rustic walls and less abrasive lighting.
If you go there and you’re nice to them, they’ll give you the current catalog for Diesel, the Italian sportswear outfit that (a la Calvin Klein‘s ’94 “kiddie porn” ads) uses the detrius of American commercial-underground media to impart an image of American dangerousness onto its Euro-designed garments. This year’s Diesel catalog’s in the manner of a tacky small-press self-defense manual, titled Fight Me. It depicts young perfect-bodied female and male models in action poses, kicking and stabbing and choking imperfect-bodied (often overweight) villains. One aren’t-we-outrageous sequence shows a little girl punching the face of an older-woman pedophile. The attack techniques throughout the book range from the impractical to the ludicrous (“Master concentration-through detachment… will yourself to levitate”). An inside-back-cover disclaimer asserts the company “deplores, in the strongest possible terms, the current prevalence, and, in some sad quarters, vogue for violence.” Yeah, right–the common parodist’s copout, getting off on something then claiming it was just a joke. Speaking of convivial boorishness…
CYLINDRICAL OBJECTS ON PARADE: I wish the current cigar-mania (stinky, choky, life-threatening, etc.) would stop, but how? It appeals to too many universal temptations (even Freud joked, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”). Besides, in an age where the lowly mass-market cigarette’s an object of scorn and humiliation, there’s nothing like a fat, smelly cigar to make a smoker feel righteously vengeful. As long as there’s social pressure to conform to social standards of blasédom, many males and some females will always choose to rebel, albeit often in crude, loud, and ineffectual ways. The ’90s spin on this, natch, is many of today’s proponents of laid-back conformity claim to be political liberals, while many of the “rebels” are Harley-ridin’, KVI-listenin’ Young Republicans. (This has its precedents, such as the decadent rich kids of pre-Victorian England; many of whom also loved a good cigar.) Speaking of social mores…
OLYMPICS IN SEATTLE IN 2012?: Besides offering yet another clear line of demarcation between the civic-builder gang (ever pursuing “world-class” status for our fair burg) and the anti-development human-scale advocates (who’d probably leave town en masse for the event’s duration), the pro-Olympic boosters are offering a unique argument. In the past, the Games have been used by cities worldwide as excuses for massive construction projects, often using vast amounts of their respective countries’ tax dollars. The Seattle Olympics boosters claim the opposite. With the town’s two new stadia, the to-be-expanded Convention Center, and other existing or already-planned facilities, we’ll already have most of the sites a Summer Games would need. All we’d have to build would be a big swimming pool, horseback and archery venues, a few dozen additional hotels and motels, and (maybe the biggest single new one) a place to house a few thousand jocks and jills for 17 days under tight security. (The 1990 Goodwill Games housed their athletes in UW dorms, but that setup might be impracticable for the Olympics for all sorts of reasons.)
‘TIL NEXT WE MEET (with more of your suggestions of yet-unrevived musical genres), be sure to become the first on your block to order the $229 Ken Griffey Jr. 12″ bronze statue seen in regional-ad editions of Time, and visit the new Seattle Art store on Wetern Ave.
Here at Misc., your officially not-as-funny-as-it-thinks-it-is column, we’re intrigued by the recent New York magazine headline, “Can Estrogen Make You Smarter?” You can just bet all the natural-superiority-of-women advocates are smugly gloating over their faxed third-generation photocopies of the article in college faculty lounges across North America. If the claims of the researchers quoted in the piece get confirmed, it’d sure make an easier argument for fem-dom supporters than the now-traditional rants against testosterone (since the latter hormone actually exists in humans of all genders). And I’m sure birth-control pills would mix perfectly into those rave-dance “smart cocktails.” I just hope the theory doesn’t inspire phrenologists (those folks who claim they can measure intelligence via the size and shape of someone’s skull) to start testing a little lower on the body.
UPDATE: The Newmark Cinema, which I said last month oughta be appropriated for fringe-theater use, has since been temporarily used just for that purpose. The Brown Bag Theater had to temporarily vacate its space elsewhere in the building, and so used one of the recently abandoned movie spaces for its production Wanna Come Back To My Place And Justify My Existence?
AD SLOGAN OF THE WEEK: “Redhook. It’s not just a beer, it’s a companion.” Is that meant as a reassurance or as an AA recruiter’s threat?
THE DESTRUCTION CONTINUES: Another of Seattle’s ever-dwindling supply of classic American-style eateries, the Nitelite in the Moore Hotel, just reopened with a new look (all spackled-brown in that pretentiously “unpretentious” way) and a new menu (featuring chicken scarpariello, bistecca melange, and mixed-grill kabobs). At least the Nitelite’s truly lovely bar wasn’t altered a bit. The bar, in fact, stayed open all the weeks the restaurant part was closed for remodeling; something the Liquor Board wouldn’t have allowed just a few years back.
YOU MAKE THE CALL: Paul Allen’s established a company related to the new Seahawk stadium project, named 1st & Goal Enterprises. I wouldn’t be surprised if he sets that up as an address to the new stadium, making up a Goal Street as a short access road from 1st Ave. S. I was always hoping the city would name a side street on the 4th Ave. S. side of the Kingdome “South Long Street,” so the Hawks would have the more appropriate street address of 4th & Long.
DRAWING THE LINE: Earlier this year, the P-I ran what it called a week-long test run of eight new comic strips. Those which proved most popular with readers, the paper claimed, would be added to an expanded Coffee Break section. This month, the paper added all eight newcomers. It made room by shrinking some Coffee Break features and dropping others–including Bill Griffith’s up-from-the-underground classic Zippy the Pinhead. None of the new strips so far show any wit or style or reason for being (other than demographic target-marketing) Some of the new batch are almost amazingly amateurishly drawn. (Hint to editors: Dilbert‘s popular in spite of its boxed-in look, not because of it.) The closest thing to an exception is the competent if unspectacular gagstrip Zits, by veteran stripper Jerry Scott and editorial cartoonist Jim Borgman.
Zippy, however, is a masterpiece of exquisite draftsmanship, precision dialogue, and multi-layered humor. It treats its readers not as statistics but as intelligent fun-lovers. And it loves to eat a great corn dog. Zippy is in the domain of the P-I‘s fellow Hearst subsidiary King Features Syndicate, as are four of the paper’s new comics. Back in the day, William Randolph Hearst made his papers run George Harriman’s now-acknowledged classic Krazy Kat even though it scored low in popularity polls, because Harriman’s surrealistic shenanigans added that little touch of quality Hearst’s papers sorely needed. The folks running today’s P-I (Hearst’s second-largest remaining daily paper) ought to do what the old man would’ve done and bring the Pinhead back.
Update: The day after this was posted, the P-I announced it would resume the Pinhead’s misadventures begginning on Labor Day. Yay!
WORD OF THE WEEK: “Aporia.”
(We’re still asking the question: Can you think of any formerly popular musical genre which hasn’t been the subject of an attempted “hip” revival in recent years? Make your recommendation at clark@speakeasy.org.)
I KNOW IT’S PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE, but here’s my fantasy: We move the now-surplused Kingdome to the Interbay landfill, then turn it into a community of tomorrow. In the stands: moderately priced housing, artists’ studios, offices, and light-industrial work spaces. In the corridors: tasty brewpubs and burger stands, charter schools, and convenient shops. On the playing field: a combo park, playfield, bazaar, and art/ performance space. At least let’s dismantle and rebuild the Dome’s prefab pavilion annex for a year-round street fair, complete with food and merchandise booths, exhibits, and an all-ages music club. The gracefully-curved pavilion looks too neat (like an inner hallway in some giant space station) to just trash.
UPDATE: The bike-messenger zine Iron Lung, mentioned here in May, has a new address: c/o Stephanie Ehlinger, 1719 E. Spring St. #104, Seattle 98122.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: PMS Crunch, from a Scarsdale, NY outfit called “Time of the Month Inc.,” claims in food-trade magazine ads to be “the perfect combination of salty and sweet–the taste and the gift that’s always in season.” The can promises “Chocolate, Nuts, and More Chocolate.” Its primary slogan: “The Best Snack… Period!” (Wholesale orders can be obtained at 1-800-PMS-44ME.)
NEWS YOU CAN ABUSE: I got some decidedly mixed messages from those huge newspaper ads for the Fox News Channel. I couldn’t tell whether the ads’ incessant insistance on fair, unbiased reporting on the channel is meant to trash CNN (which Fox proprietor Rupert Murdoch has previously, and falsely, accused of liberal bias) or to appease viewers apprehensive about the conservative bias of other Murdoch properties (most infamously, the New York Post and London Sun).
In any event, I’m intrigued by the notion of a news source with more nuts-‘n’-bolts info and less mealy-mouthed “analysis.” Of course, that’s not what Fox News gives you. That’d require more people and money than a startup cable channel’s gonna have (even one with Murdoch’s dough). Instead, you get hour upon hour of talking-head interviews and pontification, officially “unbiased” ‘cuz the opinionating’s done by the guests, not the hosts. This is augmented during daytime hours by functional but unremarkable top-of-the-hour news briefs.
FRAG-MENTATION: The other day I was talking with a musician who said her all-time favorite childhood memories included Fraggle Rock, Jim Henson’s Canadian-produced ’80s puppet series. The more she triggered my own memories, the more the show seemed a metaphor for the precarious existence of the would-be “alternative” artist or intellectual in our day and age. If you stay where you are, you can be safe and happy, working and playing and having funny misadventures with your own kind, but at the cost of ireversibly depleting the one resource that sustains you (the rock/ the safety of your subculture). Leave in one direction, and you end up in a smotheringly bourgeois purgatory (the handyman’s shop/ middle-class satiety). Leave in another direction, and you risk more directly hostile forces (the Fraggle-eating monster boy/ censorious conservatives). In the show’s final episode, the Fraggles found a solution to their dilemma by tunnelling to a new home. Perhaps we all need to (at least metaphorically) find our way toward a new premise for our lives and work.
THE INSANITY CONTINUES: I don’t care how the Camlin Hotel’s new owners redevelop the rest of the hotel’s block (now just parking and a motor-hotel annex). And if they must upscalize the hotel rooms, the rest of us will just have to find another site for our wedding receptions and/or just-divorced parties. But the plan to replace the venerable Cloud Room with luxury penthouse suites simply must be stopped. I don’t know how, but it must.
At a time when prefab retro-cocktail hangouts and stinky “cigar bars” are sprouting all over, we mustn’t lose one of the last real, un-“restored” martini emporia. I’m sure the Camlin-block development will still be plenty profitable with an intact Cloud Room. I suggest you go there at every opportunity in the coming weeks, and let it be known (both in the lounge and at the front desk) you love the joint and seek the chance to keep going there in the future.
I just spent half a week in Corvallis (Latin for “Heart of the Valley”), the Oregon hamlet where I’d spent some of my post-adolescent years. I was there to revisit childhood memories (unlike Seattle, most of the buildings there in the late ’70s are still there) and to meet my aunt and uncle. Uncle Kurt looks just like the late Days of Our Lives star Macdonald Carey; like Carey’s character, he was (before his retirement) the leading physician in an isolated college town, a pillar of kindly authority in a place that valued such things. Unlike Days’ fictional town of Salem, Corvallis has no known international spy rings or demonic-possession cases (there’s more treachery in Oregon’s real Salem, the state capital).
Corvallis is a place you have to want to go to, deep in the fertile Willamette Valley. It’s 10 miles from the freeway and Amtrak (both at Albany), 50 miles from commuter air service (at Salem or Eugene), 100 miles from Portland. It’s a place of unbeatable scenery, especially with the low cloud ceiling and the summertime field burning. It’s a real town, a feat of collective architecture/ planning/ whatever. Narrow streets are lined with big trees and shrubs. The buildings are human-scale, mostly amiacably rundown. Downtown’s still intact and prosprous, despite the loss of a few big chain stores (the Penney’s storefront now holds a Starbucks and a Noah’s Bagels). The outlying cul-de-sac streets are still part of the town, not elite-retreat suburbs.
It’s a company town, and the company’s Oregon State University (née Oregon Agricultural College), home of the fighting Beavers. It’s a damn handsome college, with low-rise ’20s brick classroom buildings built close together. At the campus’s heart is the Memorial Union (“Vnion” in the exterior stone lettering), an elegant, state-capital-like student union building.
It’s a place where small-town kids arrive, learn a trade in concrete, physical-plane-of-existence stuff (food growing and processing, computers, machines, chemicals, earth sciences), and in the process learn about getting along with people. One of the things they learn how is interracial dating’s no big deal–the college imports out-of-state black athletes (like future Sonic Gary Payton), who invariably end up dating white women (Af-Am females being scarce, even with the rise of the women’s basketball program). (One of the few Af-Ams to grow up in Corvallis was ex-Mariner Harold Reynolds. No, I don’t know anything gossipworthy about either Reynolds or Payton.)
State budget cuts have hit OSU hard. While private funding is helping keep the physical plant up (with several big new buildings going up this summer), enrollment is now less than three-quarters of its 1990 peak of 16,000. Fewer students mean local merchants sell fewer kegs of beer, fewer copies of Penthouse, fewer jogging bras. What’s kept the town going are the office-park businesses that like to put down roots near tech schools, such as the Hewlett-Packard plant and the CH2M-Hill engineering firm.
Also, there’s not much nightlife (though they’re finally getting regular punk shows and have an improving college-radio station). There’s a granolahead scene, but it doesn’t rule the town like in Eugene. There is a “Music of Your Life” radio station (the network KIXI used to belong to). The yellow pages list more multimedia production companies than video-rental stores. There’s a feminist small press (Calyx), and a strong gay-lib movement (surrounded by Lon Mabon’s notorious anti-gay crusaders elsewhere in the valley).
Despite these struggles, Corvallis was recently cited in one of those “top places to live” books as one of America’s most progressive towns. I don’t know if the honor’s deserved, but it is a near-perfect example of the kind of strait-laced yet “mellow” place Utne Reader readers might love. Oregon was always Washington’s older, more patrician sibling; Corvallis is a jewel-box setting for this staid “civil society” attitude. It’s the sort of town where almost nobody’s too rich, too poor, or too dark; where everybody (in certain circles) has some post-high-school education, where everybody wears sensible shoes and drives sensible cars; where even the frat houses separate their bottles for recycling; where Lake Wobegon and Reagan’s “Morning in America” prove to be the same fantasy–soothing for some, scary for others.
WELCOME BACK TO MISC., the pop-cult column that just can’t think of any good jokes about the Eastside having its own area code. When the outer reaches of western Washington became “360,” at least one could joke about “going full circle” or “matters of degrees.” But there’s nothing worth saying about a nothing number like “425.” It’s the Bellevue of three-digit numbers.
SIGN OF THE WEEK (outside Bruegger’s Bagels in Pioneer Square): “Our salmon is smoked. We’d appreciate it if you didn’t compete.”
MEN ARE FROM MARS, WEIRD WEBSITES ARE FROM VENUS: Amid all the media coverage earlier this winter when the Deja Vu strip-club chain bought the Showbox building downtown (but not the nightclub operating therein), nobody mentioned how its retail spaces had been previously porn-related. First Avenue in the ’40s hosted a string of penny arcades, bowling alleys, and other inexpensive entertainments. One of these was the Amusement Center, operating in the Showbox building’s ground floor. By the ’70s, the Amusement Center had become a porn peep-show operation. In 1978, the peep show took on the name “The Venusian Church,” enveloping its attractions within a New Age-esque ideology of sexual freedom. (It got written up in national media as “the churchof the sacred sleaze.”) Besides the coin-op movies and live strippers, it advertised sex-ed classes and workshops, some of which were held at a camp-like compound outside Bothell. Those who paid for the workshops were invited to pay more to join the church, with assorted consensual “encounters” promised as a benefit. But by the early ’80s, one the group’s founders had died; its compound was razed for suburban sprawl; the peep operation was sold (eventually morphing into today’s Lusty Lady across the street); and the Venusian Church faded from public sight. Some members continued to practice group marriage and tantric-yoga sex rituals at a house on the Eastside, but offered no publicly-advertised programs.
But now, like disco, Qiana, and other ’70s relics, the Venusians are back. They’ve got a website which sells $50 “associate memberships” providing access to online porno stills, which (according to the free samples) appear to have be from pre-existing CD-ROMs. For $100, they throw in enrollment in a “divine sexuality” course called Pathway to Paradise, billed as a prerequisite for more advanced levels of involvement. These advanced levels are advertised on the web site as taking place on “The Isle of Eros,” and as including everything from revelations of eternal sacred mysteries to real sex rituals, the latter including “a mystical marriage” with “a divine priest or priestess.” The site’s vague about what the latter entails, but it’s not direct sex-for-money; the “priesthood” is billed as comprising advanced group members rather than hired help.
I knew people who were involved in the old Venusian operation and either loved what they learned from it or got bored and wandered away. Still, the new Venusian pitch rings off alerts in my Skeptic Zone. It combines the promise of relief from spiritual isolation with the promise of relief from sex frustration, two of the most effective come-on lines known to humanity–especially to lonely, isolated Net users of any gender. (The site includes many buzzwords from “sex positive feminism” as well as more traditionally male-directed orgy fantasies.) I’m fully in favor of spiritual exploration, and of finding safe ways to learn about your sexual nature. But I’d try to find out what a group’s really about, in plainer language than the Venusians’ sales hype, before plunking down big bucks. (Those without Web access can write the Venusians at P.O. Box 2607, Seattle 98111.)
‘TIL NEXT WE MEET, observe but don’t buy the Dennis Rodman fashion doll at FAO Schwarz, and consider these observations from Susan Sontag: “We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.”
(Mark your calendars now for our grandioser-than-ever Misc.@11 anniversary party; Sunday, June 8 at Ace Studio Gallery, 619 Western Ave.)
THE MAILBAG: Reader Larry Gilbert has additional info about our all-time favorite soft drink ingredient, glycerol ester of wood rosin: “When I last read up on it, I learned it’s added to citrus-juice-based sodas as an emulsifier, to keep the citrus oils from separating. Most soda makers think it’s undesirable to have a carbonated drink that has to be shaken up. (Orangina is a notable exception. Track it down at QFC sometime, and note the `gently shake’ direction on the can.)”
BETTING AGAINST THE HOUSE: This guy in the north end has this home he’s willing to sell for a mere $1,000 or so. All you have to do to qualify, according to the large print on the forms you get when you follow signs to the place on weekends, is write a winning essay about the American court system. But then you read the fine print on the form and it turns out there’s also a $99 “credit check” fee required from all entrants, refundable only if fewer than 2,700 entries are received (in which case the essay-contest shtick will be dropped and the house will be offered to regular brokers). While it may be within the letter of the law distinguishing legal contests from illegal private lotteries (one area where the state doesn’t want private competition), you can still experience the warm thrill of helping someone else achieve his or her dream home, for far less than one month’s payment on the place you’re living in now.
LO-DEFINITION TV: TCI Cable, still in its long-delayed replacement of low-capacity cable lines in Seattle (promised “next year” for the past few years and required by its city contract to be done by 1/99), will at least get new digital transmission equipment and new home cable boxes soon. No word yet when we’ll get it; national TCI HQ sez “most” of its local systems will switch within the year. Finally, after being stuck all these years with a mere 40 channels, you might get something close to the 500 channels promised long ago by TCI bossman John Malone.
There’s a catch, of course. As anybody who’s worked with computer graphics knows, digital images can be compressed and transmitted at a vast range of levels, from the super-hi-res rates sometimes called “high definition TV” to the super-lo-res rates of Internet movie clips. According to an NY Times story, TCI plans to squeeze 12 digital channels onto the bandwidth it now uses for one old-style analog TV channel. Each of these new channels will have half the image detail of a current analog broadcast or cable channel. (If you’re squinting to follow a baseball game on a big-screen TV now, just wait!) TCI insists most viewers won’t notice the difference. But if they’re smart, they’ll equip these new cable boxes for variable compression-rate reception. That way, they can get away with videocassette-quality images for, say, BioDome reruns on Showtime, but still provide the ultra-sharpness for High Noon on AMC.
ONE-POINT-FIVE CHEERS: It took a bit, but I decided I support the Paul Allen football stadium scheme. It’s not just to infuriate all my conformist-nonconformist pals on Capitol Hill, who seem to hate pro football even more than they hate TV or the popular religions. (Maybe they’re still in rebellion against the jocks who were mean to ’em in high school.) Here are my reasons: 1) If Allen’s gonna spend his middle age commissioning monuments to himself and his relatives (a UW gallery and library, the Experience Music Project, the twice-aborted Seattle Commons, a big Renton office park, that private home in the San Juans where a summer camp used to be), one of these monuments might as well be one where soccer games and the Boat Show can happen. 2) The financing scheme’s less onerous than it could’ve been, and less than the baseball stadium’s tax plan is. The existing hotel-motel tax will run a few more years, and stadium contractors won’t have to pay sales tax on their concrete. 3) I happen to like watching football, if the price is right and if it’s at least a team of lovable losers like the Hawks. So there.
MISC., YOUR LOCAL non-hiking column, is downright disappointed Washington won’t impose a sports logo tax to help pay for one of Paul Allen’s construction megaprojects. It would’ve been so neat to see people “vote with their pocketbook” and not pay the extra 50 cents or so for the right symbol on their shirts, jackets, duffel bags, etc. Judges would have had to somberly decide whether a cap with Mariner-like colors and the initial “S” really was a Mariners cap. Niketown would have sold T-shirts promoting Michael Jordan only as a cartoon movie star.
THE DESTRUCTION CONTINUES: Little-noticed amid the end of Cyclops was the simultaneous demise of another Belltown eatery, the somewhat more working-class My Suzie’s (successor to the legendary Trade Winds). Its ambience could go from rough-‘n’-tumble to retro-lounge to soul-revival on successive nights. Its closure, allegedly at the pushing of the ex-Sailors Union of the Pacific building’s new owners, makes non-hoity-toity downtown gathering places an even more endangered species. How long will the remaining five or six spots of this type hold on?
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Darn, I hope us Americans can soon get to taste Wacky Vegi brand vegetables. The latest thing in England, these are bags of frozen corn, baby carrots, peas, cauliflower, specially coated with chocolate, pizza, baked-bean, and cheese & onion flavors! Their manufacturer was convinced to launch them by an anti-cancer awareness group, willing to try desperate measures to get more Brit kids to eat their veggies. (Hey, anything would be more appealing than traditional English overboiled food, right?) Speaking of grocery wonders…
IN THE BAG: By the time this comes out, QFC should’ve opened its big new store on Capitol Hill and finished branding its own identity on Wallingford’s once-feisty Food Giant. The new Capitol Hill store was originally to have been a Larry’s Market, but QFC outbid Larry’s at the last minute. (If the retail development had gone as originally planned, we would’ve had Larry just a block away from Moe!) Meanwhile, a strip-mall QFC’s under construction in the formerly rural Snohomish County environs of my childhood, bringing 24-hour, full shopping convenience to a place where a kid used to have to go two miles just to reach a gas station that sold candy bars on the side.
These openings represent small steps in a chain that’s gone in 40 years from a single store on Roosevelt in ’58 (still open) to 15 stores in the mid-’70s (including five taken over when A&P retreated from its last Pacific stores) to 142 stores in Washington and California today. It’s rapidly expanded in the past decade, even as many larger chains retreated from neighborhoods and whole regions. (The once-mighty A&P name now stands over only 675 stores, down from 5,000 in the early ’60s.)
While the new store isn’t QFC’s biggest (that’s the Kmart-sized U Village behemoth), it’s still a useful 45,000-square-foot object lesson in the economics of the foodbiz. The first real supermarkets, in the ’30s, were as small as the First Hill Shop-Rite. New supermarkets kept getting built bigger and bigger ever since, in stages. QFC was relatively late at building ’em huge; in the early ’80s, it proudly advertised how convenient and easy-to-navigate its 15,000-square-foot stores were compared to the big ‘uns Safeway and Albertsons were then building in the suburbs.
Grocery retailing’s a notoriously small-profit-margin business. The profits come from volume, from higher-margin side businesses (wine, deli, in-store bakery), and from gaining the resources to muscle in on wholesaling and processing. QFC started as a Thriftway franchise, part of the Associated Grocers consortium. AG’s one reason indie supermarkets can survive in Washington; it gives individual-store owners and small chains a share in the wholesaler’s piece of the grocery dollar.
What QFC pioneered, and others like Larry’s and the Queen Anne Thriftway have since further exploited, is a “quality” store image. The idea’s that if your store’s known for “better” items and service, you can retreat a little from cutthroat price competition (i.e., charge more). From the Husky-color signs to the old Q-head cartoon mascot (designed by ex-KING weatherman Bob Cram) to the “QFC-Thru” plastic meat trays, every visible aspect of the store’s designed to say “Hey this ain’t no everyday corn-flake emporium.”
Of course, now with everybody in the biz trying to similarly fancy themselves, QFC still has to keep prices in line with the other guys, at least on the advertised staple goods. But it remains a leader in the game of wholesome-yet-upscale brand identity, a shtick most of the now-famous chain retailers from Seattle have adopted; indeed, an image the city itself has tried to impose upon us all.
WELCOME TO A MAY-DAY MISC., the pop-culture column that believes if the Seahawks had been even half as incessant on the field as their pseudo-grassroots fan group has been in the political arena, the team would never have gotten into its current mess.
THE FINE PRINT (on separate sides of a King Edward Cigar box): “These cigars are predominantly natural tobacco with non-tobacco ingredients added”; “This Product contains/ produces chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, and birth defects or other reproductive harm”; “A Great American Custom: Ask for King Edward Birth Announcement Cigars.”
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: They’re billed as “Seattle’s Original,” despite actually coming from Darkest Bothell. Despite this labeling inaccuracy, Frutta Italian Sodas do have a certain bite all their own, combining assorted fruit and “cream” (vanilla) flavors with my personal all-time favorite soda ingredient, glycerol ester of wood rosin (it’s a thickening agent that gives fruit-flavored pop a “mouthfeel” more like that of real juice). At hipper convenience stores near you.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Iron Lung is Stephanie Ehlinger’s conversation and information zine for the bike-messenger community. Issue #2 includes a historical account of the Critical Mass rides, first-person stories of weirder-than-normal messenging runs, and an ad for a bicycle-injury attorney. Free at Linda’s and other outlets, or pay-what-you-can to 924 16th Ave., #204, Seattle 98122,
LIKE SWEEPS WEEKS ON THE SOAPS, real life often brings short fits of big changes in between long stretches of stasis. This might be one of those times, at least locally. First, Rice sez he won’t run for mayor again, opening up at least the possibility of a City Hall not completely owned by megaproject developers. Second, the Weekly, 21-year voice of the insider clique that gave us Rice, gets sold.
Third and least publicized of the trends, Nordstrom announces a flattening of its previously rapid sales-growth trend. Since the ’70s, Nordy’s has personified the philosophy of upscale-boomer consumerism and the aesthetic of obsessive blandness cultivated by the Rice administration, the Weekly, and other insider institutions. It’s the centerpiece of Rice’s whole downtown plan, as this paper has previously documented. Nordy’s troubles are partly due to national shopping trends away from the mainstreamed wares of department stores and mall shops, toward specialty boutiques and discounters. But I’d like to think this was also affected by changing customer tastes, away from the tired retrowear pushed lately by Nordy’s (and by corporate fashion in general). But industry trend-proclaimers insist retro’s still the way to go. For this fall, they’re planning to succeed the ugly-but-spirited ’70s revival with an ’80s power-suit revival. Everything you hated about Reagan-era dressing is slated to come back, from Dress for Success pomposity to women’s “menswear” with shoulder pads almost suitable for playing football in. I’m confident this won’t be nearly as popular as its pushers want it to be. What remains to be seen is how far down this gap between sellers’ and buyers’ tastes will drag Nordy’s and other companies.
It’s easy to tell why the industry loves the looks of the ’70s and early ’80s. They represent a time before DIY culture really took off, a time when a fashion industry at its peak of power felt it could dictate trends which the nation’s shoppers would ecstatically obey, no matter how homely or depersonalized. Similarly, Nordstrom’s business strategy has been heavily predicated on wringing sweetheart deals from cities and mall landlords. But with neighborhood and strip-mall shops now drawing business away from big malls, and online shopping arriving any year now, high-profile locations aren’t going to be as important. Nordy’s collection-of-shops store layout might help it weather this sea change into a post-mass-market era, if it doesn’t get caught up in trying to preserve a passing status quo.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, stock up on dented cans of marischino cherries at the Liquidator’s Outlet store in the old Sears basement, check out the new Tube Top record (splendiforously fresh!), and ponder these words attributed to Lilian Helman: “If I had to give young writers advice, I’d say don’t listen to writers talking about writing.”
IN STORE: The operators of Pin-Down Girl and Speedboat, those two nearly-adjacent Belltown hipster-clothing boutiques, have decided to no longer run two stores with such similar stuff so close. Some of Speedboat’s current stock will be consolidated at Pin-Down; the rest will be shipped to a new store the owners plan to open somewhere in California. They’re keeping the Speedboat space, and will turn it into a new business concept, as yet not officially announced.
SPIN AND MARDI: Sit & Spin’s little Mardi Gras Burlesque Revue was everything one could reasonably expect from a Carnival celebration among the infamous reservedness here in City Lite. It expressed a more sophisticated debauchery, and a more spirited approach to sexuality, than “alternative” subcultures usually endulge in.
Among the most pleasant surprises at the show was the presence of a large deaf contingent (serviced by a sign-language interpreter) at such a relatively non-saintly affair. Think about it: Blind people, in media representations, get to have the full range of human qualities (Ray Charles, Scent of a Woman, that Air Touch Cellular spokesdude), but deaf people are stereotyped as benchmarks of PC propriety (the closest thing to an exception was Ed Begley Jr.‘s womanizing character on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman). Even Edison and Beethoven are usually depicted as saintlier figures than they really were. Until TV closed-captioning and opera “supertitles” became widespread, the only culture thangs the hearing-impaired were welcomed into tended to be either evangelical church services or concerts by self-congratulatory folk singers. I’d always figured that putting up with such unrelenting sanctimonies could be a tougher thing to live with than deafness itself.
KIDSTAR RADIO, R.I.P.: Worthy attempt at a business model for commercial radio that didn’t depend on Arbitron’s ratings, instead using “membership” magazines and other promotional goodies to attract and keep sponsors. I’ve been writing and complaining about the suckiness of the Arbitron-controlled radio biz for over a decade. The problem has merely been exacerbated by recent government-approved station consolidations. Today’s radio biz only gives a damn about specific segments of the citizenry, ignoring preteens, people too old to be boomers, and (in this region) minorities. Teens and young adults were similarly ignored by almost all local radio throughout the ’80s, when virtually nobody who wasn’t an upscale ’60s-generation person was deemed worthy of the medium’s attention. In the universe of commercial radio (and of essentially commercial “public” radio), to be demographically incorrect by Arbitron’s standard is to not exist.
INSIDE SCOOP: Someone at the Kingdome Home Show was passing out “Save Our Shows” petitions, asking the powers-that-be to ensure room for home shows, auto shows, RV shows, etc. in any future Kingdome or replacement-stadium project. It’s only fair. The original idea behind the Dome was one structure to host different sports and different floor shows. If economics now indicate separate arenas for each game are more lucrative, there’s still a need for a place to have rotating sales booths in.
The marketplace-bazaar setup, with ailes of separately-run sales and demonstration booths, is among the world’s oldest and most widespread social institutions. More diverse and enticing than big single-operator stores, more sociable than scattered strip-mall stores, it appeals to a sense of discovery and spectacle rather than mere utilitarian acquisition. If I were county exec Ron Sims, negotiating with Paul Allen’s people about subsidies for a replacement football stadium, I’d demand an exhibition space at least as big as today’s Dome plus its overflow pavilion, with the county getting a slice of rental income from it. And I’d hustle to have that space booked year-round: Health fairs, book fairs, computer fairs, kid fairs, senior fairs, new-age fairs, arts and performance fests, carnivals, Convention Center overflow exhibits, world’s-largest-rummage-sales, etc.
FAST MONEY: Somebody tried to tell me once how computer technology was like Jeopardy!, an answer in search of a question. I replied if that was the case, then Microsoft was more like Family Feud, where the most popular answer is decreed to be correct. Whether this means Gates will be compared by posterity to the eternally gladhanding Richard Dawson (or even to the more tragic figure of Ray Combs) remains to be seen.
NFL Films’ 16mm Heroics:
The Movies of Champions
Original online essay, 1/28/97
As a U.S. Male who came of age in the ’70s, it seemed pro football was always with us, and so was its official biographer, NFL Films. In schools, at church teen retreats, on the lonely late-afternoon weekend TV slots now occupied by infomercials, NFL Films’ half-hour reels of grainy 16mm film were ubiquitous, with their pompous narration and brassy music scores.
So it’s surprising to learn that American football, a major college and high-school sport since the 1890s, was a decidedly secondary attraction as a pro sport, far less popular than baseball, until the ’60s. The pro game’s explosion had three main causes: TV coverage, the NFL-AFL merger, and the evangelizing artistry of NFL Films.
The early to mid ’60s was a golden age for sports documentaries, thanks largely to the introduction of lightweight 16mm cameras with advanced lenses and film stocks. The surfing film The Endless Summer was a hit in theaters; Warren Miller’s skiing films drew roadshow crowds across the northern U.S. and in Canada. Ed Sabol, a Philadelphia businessman with no pro filmmaking experience, sent in a blind bid to shoot the official filmed record of the 1962-63 NFL championship game. The next year, Sabol sent crews to every NFL game, editing the footage into a catalog of highlight reels. By 1965 Sabol convinced the league’s team owners to buy his company and keep him in charge of it. Ed’s son Steve Sabol, who in college was both a football player and an art major, soon became the studio’s creative czar. He still is.
From the start, Steve Sabol established a house style that would sell the game and the league, albeit by using the filmmaker’s art to bend the game’s story. Football is essentially a game of coaching and planning, with squads trying to either complete or stop fully choreographed five-second plays. But Steve Sabol’s guys presented instead a game of individual heroics.
“We emphasize the struggle of a game rather than the strategy,” Sabol explained in a recent phone interview. “We portray the game as a passion. When I was a [college] player, the game was only shown from the top, from cameras in the grandstands. I wanted to show the muscles bulging, the snot spraying, the sweat flying. Football is a very visceral sport. There are two spheres in sport; there’s one sphere where things are measured by seconds and inches and yards, then there’s the sphere where things are measured by heart and guts.
“When we started, our goal was to create an image for the game; to show sport at its most passionate and visceral level. But at the time we were just a bunch of young guys who loved to make movies and loved pro football and wanted to communicate that love to an audience.”
The first film released under the NFL Films name, They Call It Pro Football (commissioner Pete Rozelle called it the best sports movie he’d ever seen), started with a booming intro (written by Steve) that set the stage for three decades of histronics: “It starts with a whistle and ends with a gun. Sixty minutes of close-in action from kickoff to touchdown… A call. The ball is snapped and the play continues. A drama of man on man and a race against the clock. It’s precision, persistance, power. The unleashed speed of the kickoff. The whistling feet of a great runner. The reckless fury of a goal-line stand. The crowning glory of a winning touchdown. The swelling roar of the crowd… This is pro football, the sport of our time.” (These and countless later, equally momentous lines were delivered with booming stoicism by ex-Philly newscaster John Facenda, who died in 1984 from the cigarettes that had given his voice its trademark gritty rasp.)
Facenda’s voice and the stirring martial music (first assembled from stock-music selections, since the ’70s taken from a library of original orchestral tracks) accompanied footage that used every known sports-film trick and many tricks NFL Films invented. A typical segment of a film might cut from overhead shots to field shots to cutaways of anxious fans to wired-for-sound coaches’ exhortations to reverse-angle replays to super slo-mo shots made with a mammoth 600-mm telephoto lens to tackle shots pumped up with highly exaggerated sound effects.
Even the studio’s “humor” reels were rough-hewn and overblown, with Mel Blanc giving the only unfunny performances of his career by means of trying-too-hard-to-be-wacky gag voices.
As the NFL grew in prestige and popularity (if not in intellectual respect), NFL Films became an institution within an institution. Between seasons it churned out a few films on other sports, commercial and industrial films, and even a few music videos (for Slayer and Bruce Springsteen). It was supposed to make a propaganda film saluting the US military’s work in the 1991 Gulf War, but the deal fell through. And it’s been called upon to replicate its style in movies about the sport (Semi-Tough, Brian’s Song, Black Sunday,Paper Lion, Everybody’s All-American) and in last year’s Nike commercials about pee-wee football.
While the league itself is in trouble on several fronts (greedy owners, unpopular team moves), NFL Films is as big as ever. Today’s NFL Films is a 200-employee outfit in its own office complex behind a New Jersey shopping mall, with its own film labs, editing suites, soundstages, and vaults (Sabol claims the only human event more thoroughly documented on film than NFL football is World War II). It sends at least two camera people and four support staff to every game. Everything but the in-studio narration segments is still shot on film, though some editing is now done on video with telecine color correction (I prefer the more mythic look of the older films, with more grain and washed-out colors). The footage they shoot is edited into weekly shows for ESPN and HBO (coaches’ and players’ cusswords are still bleeped on the HBO shows), annual highlight reels for each team, plus several home videos a year, occasional TNT specials, and the annual Road to the Super Bowl special. The 98-piece London Symphonic Orchestra records two sessions’ worth of background music for NFL Films every year.
The NFL Films look has influenced major filmmakers; Steve Sabol loves to tell how Sam Peckinpah publicly noted “the way we used the camera at different speeds, the editing and the intensity of the violence as an influence on how he did the end of The Wild Bunch.” But the thing’s really a universe of its own. By giving heroic treatment to players whose faces can’t even be seen on TV, it’s forged an audience intimacy the real game can’t provide. As Sabol calls it, “What we are is storytellers and mythmakers.”
(Some selected NFL Films video releases: Feel the Power, Idol Makers, NFL Throwbacks, NFL Talkin’ Follies, and The NFL’s Greatest Moments.)
`MISC.’ GLADLY LEAVES behind the Year of ’96 Tears and heads face-forward into a time of uncertainty in many aspects of our civic culture. Three months ago, the regional architecture rag Arcade ran a story called “Is Seattle Losing It?” The piece was predicated on the Commons defeat, which I called a victory for city-dwellers and they called a defeat for planners and dreamers. Since then, my faith in local voters’ priorities was further affirmed by the transit vote, which will add immeasurably to regional liveability.
THEN CAME the dueling-stadia debacle. Since the Mariners’ and Seahawks’ demands and responses to those demands seem to change several times daily, there’s no way to predict how it’ll turn out. It should’ve been expected, tho’. Sports-superstar salaries continue to skyrocket, while sports TV ratings have been fractured by cable. Since team owners won’t give up their private jets, their only new-income sources (besides team-logo products) are to sop up additional stadium revenue (through high prices, luxury boxes, etc.) and to slash stadium costs (by getting taxpayers to foot the bill).
It’s all coming to a head now because some U.S. Senators threaten legislation this next session to stop localities from issuing tax-exempt bonds for stadia. So if the owners are gonna get their big public subsidy, they’ve gotta get it now. Hence, the PR blitzes, threats, and crocodile tears to cajole our leaders and us to fork over a staggering half-billion. That’s $100 (plus future bond interest) for every Washingtonian. And it still won’t solve Big Sports’ real problem–runaway costs in the face of heightened competition for entertainment and ad bucks. The sports biz hasta get its own house in order; then it can invest its own dough into new houses based on the basic risk-and-return principles that got these owners rich in the first place. Besides, there’s something annoying about the sense of bland “luxury” in the drawings of the proposed new Hawk stadium, something deadeningly Commonsesque.
MEANWHILE, the side of Seattle Stranger readers are expected to care about has hit its own doldrums, as Kathleen Wilson deftly analyzed here last month. The major record companies, MTV, and commercial radio have succeeded at killing “alternative” music by ignoring or mishandling today’s more original artists in favor of promoting the most formulaic, derivative bands. (How can anything called “Blur” be distinctive? How can anything called “Garbage” be really good?) That, and the maturing of the late-’80s music scenesters beyond prime moshing age, has left a distinct malaise over the local scene. Many of the more promising 1993-94 bands have broken up. Others are wallowing in the purgatory of record-label nonsupport. The three top local clubs get their biggest draws from touring acts. Everybody from the NY Times to Time has noted how the latest Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Presidents discs are vastly underselling their predecessors.
But they’re underplaying the fact that overall record sales are holding steady, despite the drop in superstar sales. This means more listeners are listening to a wider variety of stuff, not just the same few hyped celebrities. For everyone except the major labels and the celeb-obsessed media, this is good news. It’s good for musicians, for indie labels, for the stores that bother to stock indie labels, for clubs, for fans who prefer non-arena venues, for publications like this that tell you who the heck all these touring indie bands are, and especially for my oft-stated ideal of a decentralized culture, where smaller groups of people are into things they really like instead of following the dictates of mass marketing. This is, at least on one level, what the Seattle music scene had been all about–not providing material for the rock star machine, but building an alternative to the rock star machine. To quote one of Bruce Pavitt’s early zines, “A decentralized cultural network is obviously cool. Way cool.” When the dust settles from this industrywide reorganization, I fully expect Seattle’s bands, managers, and labels to be better equipped than most for a post-superstar world. (And don’t worry about the Soundgarden guys; they can always sell more of their band-photo phone cards thru their fan club.)
MISC., YOUR SEASONAL-AFFECTIVE COLUMN, couldn’t help but be cheered up by the January Playgirl cover blurb: “Odd Men Are In!” What could be duller than square jaws, pumped pecs, and steely gazes? Conversely, what could be more fun than somebody with a deft wit, a neato wardrobe of mismatched shirts and ties, and a wicked pinball wrist? (At least that’s what I’ve always tried to tell women.)
TCI IN TROUBLE: The cable behemoth’s laying off 7 percent of its workforce, ordering exec-pay cuts, considering selling subsidiaries, and scaling back upgrade plans (though its long-promised Seattle upgrade’s officially still in the works). Boss John Malone has to placate stockholders, in particular the heirs of one recently-deceased exec, to keep the company from being sold out from under him. The long-term problem: Customers are fed up with Malone’s limited line-ups, rate hikes, and dumping of popular channels for channels Malone owns a piece of. Malone’s siphoned ratepayers’ bills into acquisitions, joint ventures, and power-grab schemes, while staying put too long with aging electronics and wires. Customers are going to mini-satellite dishes today. By ’88, they may turn to phone-company-run or Net-based video systems. I wouldn’t miss Malone, but the wrong kind of takeover could bleed even more money away from service and into junk-bond debt.
`STREET’ IMPROVEMENTS: Sesame St. was looking a little tattered in its 28th year. Once PBS’s ratings powerhouse and a merchandising gold mine, its disjointed mix of humans, Muppets, cartoons, animal films, and committee-written lesson plans has declined in viewership and grownup attention. As more of commercial TV took on Sesame’s frenetic flash, PBS found kids taking refuge in the decidedly steadier Barney and Magic School Bus. The show’s production company, Children’s Television Workshop, has taken cash from toy royalties to buy ads on the commercial networks, hoping to alert viewers that Sesame’s still on the map.
So it was a happy surprise for CTW when Rosie O’Donnell used a plush figure of Elmo, a relatively recent Sesame Muppet character, as a mascot on her talk show. O’Donnell’s endorsement brought parental attention to what had become Sesame’s most popular character. A vibrating “Tickle Me” Elmo doll is the hit toy of an Xmas season otherwise dominated by recycled older properties (Mario, Bugs, Dalmatians). A wide-mouthed, not-unbearably cute, everykid character created from a generic Muppet design, Elmo signifies kids embracing the defiantly innocent side of kidness, rejecting violent fantasy and smartass “attitude.” Now I know where the K Records listeners of tomorrow are coming from.
DOWN, ON THE FARM: Big agribusiness outfits in Calif. are suing for the right to not contribute to government-mandated marketing campaigns (the California Raisins, “Got Milk?”, California Summer Fruits). In an AP report, one plaintiff complained the slurping and chewing sounds in a Summer Fruits commercial were too sexually suggestive. Another said the mandate reeked of socialism. (Actually, it reeks of mercantilism, the belief that government’s highest duty is to enrich business.) I say government oughta quit the raisin biz. If these huge factory farmers wanna be foolish enough to kill some of the most clever and effective ads around today, let ’em.
WHITHER THE KINGDOME?: It’s not the echoing fan noise that made it such a good home for our teams. It’s the way its homeliness, its blatant architectural mediocrity, complemented the lovable-loser status of the Seahawks and pre-Griffey Mariners. Its concrete cheapness symbolized an ex-frontier town wanting to become a Big League City but unwilling or unable to do it right. Paul Allen sez he won’t buy the Hawks if they’re stuck in an aging, luxury-boxless Dome. The new M’s owners said the same. Besides the economic considerations, I think both parties were uncomfortable with an overcast-grey box whose un-gussy-uppable look of thrift contradicted today’s mania for yupscale pretension. Dunno ’bout you, but I’ll miss the humble giant hamburger bun if Allen gets the county to tear it down.
WE’LL MEET AGAIN on Boxing Day (my fave Canadian holiday!) with the annual Misc. In/Out list. ‘Til then, keep in mind my favorite aphorism from Rudolph, a line which has become my life’s motto: “Even among misfits you’re misfits!”
IT’S A THANKSGIVING MISC., the pop-cult column that asks the musical question, “Why doesn’t the columnist like sweet potatoes?” (Answer next week.)
THE MAILBAG: Ex-Almost Live! cast member John Garibaldi writes, “Credit my friend now in New Hampshire, Geordie Wilson. One visit back to Seattle this fall and he instantly renames the new REI store Hiketown.”
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Matt Asher’s Seattle Scroll has arrived to take the place of the now-suspended Perv as Seattle’s biggest one-piece-of-paper publication (it measures an odd 11″ x 40″). Its first issue was highlighted by associate editor Chris Walker’s essay on the real meaning of Chief Seattle and a haunting photo by George Vernon of Georgetown’s abandoned but still gorgeous Hat n’ Boots gas station. Biweekly at the usual dropoff sites, or from P.O. Box 3234, Seattle 98114.
BLOBOSITY: The second Seattle Scroll has a beautiful shot of the lower Queen Anne restaurant building unofficially known as The Blob. While that space still sits empty (but no longer awaiting demolition), its playful spirit lives in the hearts of local developers. The chapel now under construction at Seattle U., designed by Steven Holl, includes a sequence of oddly-shaped roof structures and baffles. As previewed in the local architecture mag Arcade, they represent elements of iconography, light, and mystery in Catholic tradition.
On a less meditative note, initial designs for the Experience Music Project at Seattle Center (still popularly known by its former working title, the Hendrix Museum) show a series of connected buildings, in shapes and colors that, looking down from the Space Needle, would vaguely resemble a smashed guitar. It attempts a “fun” rendition of Blobosity, but ultimately succumbs under the heavy thumb of Boomer-nostalgia pretensions. Speaking of spaces made for fun…
MALLED DOWN: By now there’s something pleasantly weather-beaten about Northgate, “The Mall That Started It All” (in 1950 it was the first complex of its kind anywhere), making it an almost human experience compared to newer, more hyperreal retail theaters. That hasn’t stopped mall management from vying to “upgrade” the joint with ever more yuppified chain boutiques.
But when the now-disappearing Ernst chain abandoned its N-gate hardware outlet, the mall took a rare populist turn and lured the first in-Seattle Toys “R” Us. If you’ve never been to one, it’s essentially an overgrown version of a discount-store toy department (it grew out of the long-defunct White Front discount chain). Tall shelves, narrow aisles, bright boxes, and more echoey sounds of screaming kids than in a suburban YMCA pool. The opening-day festivities included costume-character versions of favorite kiddie stars, including a woman dressed up as Barbie. (No, pervs, I didn’t ask her how she goes to the bathroom.) It’s nice to know the store’s there in case of a really good advertised special, but for day-to-day plaything accumulation I still prefer Archie McPhee’s.
IT AIN’T ME: By the time this comes out, we’ll have seen if the local media that got all aghast over Annie Dillard’s throwaway remarks about the Northwest’s intellectuals (or lack of them) will be equally incensed over the more deliberately nasty regional barbs of Nanci Donnellen, KJR-AM’s former Fabulous Sports Babe. In her new blather book, out this week and predictably titled The Babe in Boyland, the now nationally-syndicated radio sports gabber calls her ex-stomping ground “a hopeless zero” and “a fucked-up backwater town… filled with the dumbest people in the world.” Her KJR colleagues? “Small-time nobodies who thought that because they lived in Seattle they were some big deal and that the rest of the world should come kiss their asses.” To further prompt cheap over-reactions, she writes how when she moved here from Tampa she pledged to work to get the Mariners moved there. Her introduction even thanks Jeff Smulyan, the ex-Ms owner who tried to facilitate such a move, whom she calls one of her “true friends.” Yawn.
IT’S NEARLY TIME for our annual In/Out List. Your suggestions are now being accepted at Misc. World HQ. ‘Til then,ponder these improbably risque remarks attributed to Phyllis Schafly: “Marriage is like pantyhose. It all depends on what you put into it.”
I spent three days in Reno last week because there’s a hotel price war going on, that finally led to the ultimate discount–free. The Circus Circus hotel-casino (the one that used to sponsor a boat at the Seafair hydroplane races) has been giving away free nights online, at www.cybernetwork.net/c/circus/.
I hadn’t been to Reno since I was 12. Unlike other revisited childhood-memory sites, Reno is just as overwhelming now as it was then. The big hotel-casinos have gotten bigger, building huge hotel towers and parking garages. The Circus Circus is one of three casinos interconnected by skybridges to form a continuous quarter-mile-long space of slots, card games, and buffets.
But gambling profits in northern Nevada have stayed flat (as they’ve been, minus inflation, since 1970). The big new casinos have merely drawn business from independents (even the legendary Harold’s Club is now a deserted storefront); cheap hotel rates have merely drawn business from motels (which have compensated by renting at weekly rates to underclass families arriving in search of casino jobs).
Indeed, walk too far from the high-rises and you’re smack in a typical depressed inland-west town (there’s even a Spokane Street), with white and Mexican street kids boasting of their machoness, seedy bars where no microbrew has ever touched a tap, trailer parks, used-car lots that don’t bother to mop up the fluids leaking from the cars onto the concrete, and privately owned all-nite liquor stores.
Despite its problems, Reno remains a great destination with rich heritage. It was once the gambling capital of North America, before Vegas shot ahead in the ’50s. More recently, Vegas has reacted to the nationwide gambling explosion by turning itself into a collection of family theme parks, just as a new generation has become fascinated by the sinfully swingin’ culture Vegas used to symbolize. Reno’s still got that culture (or much of it).
What’s more, Vegas is a thoroughly suburbanized experience, with self-contained resorts strewn down an airport highway. Reno, in contrast, is an urban experience; 16 of its 25 major casinos (and six smaller storefront casinos) are on or near a real main street. It’s a place for strolling and watching the passing parade of giddy young honeymooners, world-weary middle-aged men in vintage suits, and troupes of exuberant senior ladies bussed in from across the west.
If Vegas is now a city for families, Reno is a city for women, specifically older women. At any given time, any given row of slot machines will be dominated by over-60 ladies emulating the grandmother in Dostoevsky’s The Gambler, gleefully losing her fortune at the roulette tables while her descendents impatiently wait for her to die.
As a city for women, Reno has nothing like the sex industry of Vegas (or even of Seattle). Porn shops are zoned far from the casino district. Strip clubs are few and small. The town’s only casino skin show (Playboy’s Ecstasy, produced by Seattle’s Greg Thompson Productions) gives almost as much emphasis to bare-butted men as to bare-breasted women.
There’s one island of unabashed masculinity in Reno–the sports-wagering area at the Cal-Neva, the biggest surviving non-hotel casino. Brown rec-room paneling. Thirty-six TVs, showing every available live game or horse race. Heinekin bottles for $1.25. Guys of all races (but only one waist measurement–XXL) arguing passionately about the baseball playoffs (“Good pitching ALWAYS beats good hitting!” “BULL-shit!”), but all agreeing the Ms would’ve won it all had Randy Johnson been healthy.
Proud yet unpretentious, loud yet inviting, the Cal-Neva (along with other indie casinos like the Nevada Club and the Original Nugget) is an honest goodtime place and a perfect Cocktail Nation destination. This, not hotel high-rises with marble shower walls, could bring the neo-hipsters and the young adults. They’d come for the old-time American sin and return for the skiing and the National Bowling Stadium. If Reno can reach out to a new generation by building on the best of what it still has, it could thrive again.
ONLINE EXTRAS
* Southwest Airlines is in many ways the Stranger of passenger air carriers. It goes out of its way to extol an attitude of fun and informal cameraderie, while actually scrambling hard and thinking cleverly to keep costs down and revenues up. Sitting in a crammed 737 without the sedating schticks used by the rest of the industry (headphones, movies, meals, warm interior colors) can be an ordeal. To Reno, it’s at least a relatively brief ordeal (95 mins.).
* My hotel room had a posted rate of $175/night. If I’d paid for it I’d feel cheated. No HBO (just a few dumb pay-per-view hits), no complimentary morning paper, no in-room coffeemaker, almost no room service (just continental breakfast in the morning, pizza and Cokes at night). The place doesn’t even have a swimming pool. You’re expected to use your room strictly for sleeping, bathing, and fucking, and to spend most of your time feeding cash to the slots and the card tables.
* To give an idea of the town’s one-industry status, there are almost 28,000 hotel and motel rooms in the Reno area, one for every nine residents. The only important non-tourism employers are the state university and the state capital (the latter in nearby Carson City). Any dip in tourism revenues wreaks havoc on local tax proceeds, further tattering social services.
* One problem affecting the tourism industry there is that the big operators have deliberately underbuilt non-gambling attractions. They haven’t even tried to attract conventions, believing conventioneers to be lesser gambling prospects. So there’s not much for families with kids (except the Circus Circus’s midway games and acrobat acts, the still-running Bonanza theme park, and a couple of ghost towns). Only one of the casinos has even a small shopping arcade; to buy most stuff, ya gotta go out to the mall.
* Tourist souvenirs, though, are happily available at many sites. (There’s even still a Woolworth’s in Reno!) This means you can get your boyfriend (or girlfriend) an “I Ate at Mustang Ranch” sweatshirt without visiting the legal brothel, situated in the forlorn hills across the county line.
* The aforementioned Playboy’s Ecstasy revue is just the kind of unabashed bad-taste experience a tourist could hope for. Male and female singers gave appropriately dumb, “high energy” renditions of Billy Joel’s lamest hits. A male magician told dumb phallic jokes while blowing up balloons (though his trained cockatoo was cool). The three boy dancers and five girl dancers were predictably frenetic and largely unerotic, through at least four changes of mini-costume. The set design looked “industrial” in an MTV/Eurodisco sort of way. The waiting area outside Harrah’s intimate 500-seat showroom featured a wall of Sammy Davis Jr. memorabilia.
* The rest of Reno’s live entertainment is disappointing at best. That plague of neo-easy-listening tripe sometimes known as “Young Country” has taken over most of the showrooms, except for the ones hosting Madonna or Motown impersonators or surviving ’50s crooners.
* My final status: $18 ahead.
(My sources include the Reno Gazette-Journal and the Utah-based magazine Edging West.)
